Good, if somewhat superficial, adaptation of James Hilton's superior novel about a group of people fleeing a revolution who are kidnapped and flown to a mysterious lamasery (a Tibetan monastery) where, free from the cares of the outside world, some of them find paradise while others perceive only a prison. Begins with titles that ask the audience if they have ever imagined a perfect world, which is significant because here (not so in the book) the protagonist, Bob Conway, is an everyman type (albeit a middle-aged, somewhat world weary everyman), and as such his character needs little more than generalities to support it. And generalities are all we ever get. At the same time, it opens the door to the Hollywood sop, the love interest, played by Jane Wyatt. Still, a pleasant drama, worth watching for the evolution of the characters as they come to terms with their new situation in life, with suspense provided by those who don't: one member of Conway's party and one of the lamas. Edward Everett Horton adds humor as a new character, a timid palentologist who learns to assert himself. As Conway, Ronald Colman is both believable and likeable. With an ending that departs from the book not so much in terms of action as psychology, and which is, in its own way, very dramatic. Over the years, parts of this film were lost, and the current restoration includes the complete soundtrack, with stills substituted for seven minutes of still-missing footage. (Trust us, it isn't much of a distraction.)

Competent if uninspired thriller about a young mother whose two children are kidnapped -- on the seventh anniversary of the kidnapping and murder of her two previous children. Made the Mystery Writers of America's list of the top 100 mystery novels of all time, probably due to the remembered effect on its members of the book's then-novel theme of child molestation (though, to be fair, it should be noted that the bad guy, even today, remains a compelling character). Clark's first suspense novel. Based in part on the real life Alice Crimmins case, of a young wife and mother accused of killing her two children. Made into a movie in 1986, starring Jill Clayburgh.

Two-part miniseries starring Zoe Saldana as young mother-to-be Rosemary Woodhouse, who unwittingly finds herself in the midst of a coven of baby-killing witches. Transplants the action of Ira Levin's novel from New York to Paris, seemingly for no reason other than to differentiate itself from Roman Polanski's original adaptation, next to which this version pales into insignificance. Good enough on its own to maintain mild interest -- provided, of course, the unnecessarily explicit and violent scenes with which the story is regularly punctuated serve their purpose in keeping you awake. (Neither Levin nor Polanski needed to resort to such tactics.) Despite its 240-minute length, the film adds very little to the story; its few embellishments -- a meaningless lesbian kiss, for instance, or the idiotic trope of a character who hallucinates then acts as if nothing unusual happened -- distract from the suspense rather than adding to it. No standouts among the performances, either, and Carole Bouquet is certainly no Ruth Gordon as Rosemary's overly-solicitous neighbor. The credits oddly state that the film is based not only on Levin's novel, but his sequel, Son of Rosemary, as well, though one would be hard-pressed to find any material drawn from the latter work, which, after all, takes place more than 30 years after the events of this story.

The tagline: "Fear for her." She is Susan Harris (Julie Christie), estranged wife of the creator (Fritz Weaver) of Proteus IV, a thinking machine so far advanced of human capabilities that it devises a cure for leukemia in only four days. The difficulty: the movie has no suspense. Soon after being activated Proteus is questioning its human masters and seeking a way to escape its "box." It infiltrates an open terminal in Harris' house, usurps the environmod that controls its every function, and imprisons Susan so that it can use her body to produce a child. It is so powerful and so superior that Susan never has a chance. A better tagline would have been, "Listen to Proteus." For that is about all we can do, listen as it embellishes its egomaniacal fantasy of taking over the world. (We are, however, rewarded with one nice line, something about Proteus not wanting to make humans obsolete but to so improve on humanity as to make computers obsolete.) Based on the book by Dean Koontz -- the original version, of course, not his 1997 rewrite. Improves on the book in the sense that Proteus itself is slightly more adult (Koontz imagined it as an adolescent with dreams of becoming flesh so as to ravish women), but falls far short in that the book's best feature was the suspense of its first half. Adding nothing to the film are its special effects, which serve clunky machinery on the one hand, and are used, on the other, to produce meaningless light shows that are possibly intended to be profound.

Less ubiquitous than the 1925 abridgement, this original and uncut version of Stoker's last novel is no less surreal and just as shocking for having been written by the same man who penned Dracula, one of the greatest horror novels of all time. It's inane, self-contradictory, badly plotted, and poorly written; it is so bizarre, in fact, that it becomes, in its own way, weirdly fascinating. Lady Arabella March is the White Worm, a legendary antediluvian snake of enormous size; the last of her kind, she has existed for millenia in England where, as the story begins, she can be seen in her tight-fitting white dresses openly angling for a profitable marriage with the psychopathic owner of a neighboring estate. This madman, however, is more interested in much more delicate Lilla Watford, with whom he periodically engages in hypnotic battles of will -- that is, when he isn't monomanically transfixed by the huge kite he has set flying above his castle. Meanwhile, a couple of fellows from another nearby estate -- one an old diplomatist, the other a young buck from Australia -- having stumbled onto Lady Arabella's secret spend their days plotting her long overdue death. The impetus for the abridgement appears to have been Stoker's use of racial epithets for an ugly and mean-spirited (yet pathetically amorous) African character. That, and perhaps a simple desire to shorten the book, for not much of consequence is removed; rather, the hack job is confined mostly to removing paragraphs here and there throughout. The oddest edit is one involving the monster: an entire sequence is cut in which the monster pursues our intrepid heroes into a river, where it is mistaken for a white whale. As director Ken Russell used little more than the idea of a woman who could transform herself into a giant snake for his 1988 adaptation, it is impossible to know whether his inspiration was this book or the abridgement. Read at your own risk.

Not a remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter, but a determindly fresh adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel as a prequel to the films The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham, the man who at great personal cost originally captured Lecter (according to the films, not the books), is lured out of retirement to help catch another serial killer, one targeting entire families, and is compelled to seek advice from his old nemesis. With too-young-looking Edward Norton as Graham and too-handome Ralph Fiennes as the killer, and a great deal more hero worship of Lecter and his supercalifragilistic intellect. Employs elements of the book not found in Manhunter -- that is, all the worst ones, including the silly ending, to which screenwriter Ted Tally adds a ridiculous Friday the 13th-type twist.

This is what noir looks like when its play of light and shadow has no psychological ground -- like just another crime drama. It is, however, one of those rare movies that reverses the typical trajectory and actually gets better as it goes along. Or rather, gets better after a certain point. The film is based on Cornell Woolrich's novel (written under his William Irish pseudonym), and so it is about the search for a woman who can provide a man falsely convicted of murdering his wife with the alibi he needs to avoid execution. The point at which it improves is also an improvement over the book. Where Woolrich was content to conceal his killer until the very end, hiding the malefactor behind literary obfuscation, Siodmak and screenwriter Bernard C. Schoenfeld reveal their "paranoiac" about halfway through, instantly heightening the drama and the suspense. But it isn't enough. This is noir light (contradiction intended), from the lightweight performances of the stars (despite Ella Raines' obvious efforts as the accused's loyal and loving friend) to Siodmak's professional yet toneless visuals. It's supposed to add up to a nightmare world of murder and betrayal, but in reality -- because the off-key theme music that is both too happy and too romantic links directly with the ending -- it comes off instead as little more than a weird detour in two interrupted lives. Also with Alan Curtis, Franchot Tone, and Thomas Gomez.

Reasonably good, fast-paced crime thriller about a diver who is hired to salvage a ship which, he discovers, hasn't sunk yet. Nominated at the time for an Edgar Award in the Paperback Original category, and it delivers on that level. Before it's all over John Lange (i.e., Michael Crichton) has mixed in money laundering, the Mafia, and missing World War II treasure. And a couple of vicious ocelots. Our hero doesn't say much, but that's probably because the plot is so breathless.

Truly awful film, based, vaguely, on the H. G. Wells novel of the same name. Unlucky plane crash survivor (David Thewlis) is picked up in the Java Sea and taken to a small island where a mad doctor with a God complex (Marlon Brando) mixes human and animal DNA in a quest to create a race of "superior" beings. Goes downhill the moment Brando appears, his face, hands and arms covered in pasty white cream, as if an allergy to sunlight were in any way relevant to his character or the story. (As metaphor for the need for him to do his work "in the dark," it is overkill of the highest order.) "The" story, in fact, is a misnomer: screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson try to tell too many stories, one of which is an ironic mirror of their "accomplishment": even as the film devolves into incoherence, Moreau's horrible creations, without regular injections, regress to their disordered animal states. Meanwhile, the beast creatures chafe at their subjugation, and the survivor, in an idea cribbed not from the book but from the first adaptation of the book, The Island of Lost Souls, meets a beautiful woman (Fairuza Balk) with whom he develops a personal relationship. And then there's Montgomery, Moreau's all but superfluous assistant, played by Val Kilmer. A self-indulgent crazy-quilt of a movie, redeemed only by a few pretty pictures along the way.

Selfish dad (Tom Cruise) gets weekend custody of his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), then gets a crash course in fatherly responsibility after Martians invade the Earth, killing or consuming everyone in sight. "Based on" -- which is to say suggested or inspired by -- H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. This time, the Martians have hidden their gigantic tripedal fighting machines underground for thousands of years, evidently in patient expectation of the day when their preferred food -- mankind -- will have topped 6.5 billion units. (Had 6 billion been enough, they would have invaded in 1999.) The special effects are state-of-the-art, and the film has its moments, but any story that requires worldwide Armageddon to teach one dad the value of raising kids is not a strong one. And Spielberg, forgetting the lesson he should have learned from Jaws, infallibly substitutes action when dialogue would have served him better. With an even more pronounced sense of anticlimax at the end than the Byron Haskin version from 1953, and that because the screenwriters failed to give Wells the credit he deserved as a writer: while Wells wrote a realistic science-based ending to match his semi-historical novel, Josh Friedman and David Koepp simply tack the same ending on to their much narrower tale of personal redemption.